WordPress College Course: Register Now for PCC Rock Creek

I’m expanding my WordPress college courses to now include Portland Community College at Rock Creek. Give yourself a holiday gift to learn WordPress next year!

Beginning January 9, 2013 and running through March 20, I will be teaching CMS Website Creation: WordPress. This is a part of their new series on Content Management System instruction. There is currently a Joomla course and now a WordPress class.

The course is three college credits and is a hybrid or blended class. It meets Wednesdays from 6-9PM with a minimum of two hours of work online.

The course includes creation of dynamic, interactive, and fully functional WordPress sites, and includes the basics of content development, management, and organization, Theme design and structure, and basics of WordPress Themes and Plugins. The course is part of the PCC Web Design degree program.

Like my courses at Clark, the demand for WordPress college courses are high. The first courses by PCC on WordPress last quarter filled up immediately.

This is the time for all of you living in the Beaverton, Hillsboro, Forest Grove, Banks, Tigard, downtown, west, and south Portland residents to dig into WordPress for only a few hours a week. Come join me.

11 Comments

Lorelle, I don’t know if you have considered teaching this in your class, but I hope you cover the question of whether to excerpt or have the entire post show up to subscribers and what the real costs and benefits are of the decision.

I just unsubscribed from following you because you use excerpts. I know you do it so you get hits on your site to increase your rankings but I wonder how many readers you and others lose because of it. If I follow someone either by subscribing to receive the posts by email or subscribe to read it in my RSS reader then I am doing it because I want to READ the posts – not because I want to be “invited” to open a browser and visit your website to read your newest post.

I am sure it seems like such a small thing to have to go to your website to read your posts – why should it matter? It is a small thing if you are the only blog a person follows but the time adds up if a reader follows a lot of blogs. I find that there are so many excellent blogs now out on the web that I can find plenty on pretty much any subject that send full posts to their subscribers. So I end up unsubscribing from any who send excerpts. I have no idea how common my behavior is.

Lastly, as a blogger myself, I personally think that the excerpt thing is “old school”. It predates smart phones. Take a ride on a Portland bus during rush hours and take a look around. You may be amazed at how many people are reading on the smart phones. It is where and when I do most of my blog reading. It is probably one of the big reasons I drop bloggers who excerpt. I want to be able to quickly blow through a lot of reading on my commute and do not want to waste the time of having my iPhone have to leave Feedly, open Safari, go to a site, and then show me a post in a less than optimal format for reading on my phone.

This is an old debate and I’m sorry that you stand on the side of cutting off good bloggers because of truncated feeds. SEO is not impacted by feed length. That is a misconception.

If you understood how WordPress works, you might have a different perspective. My feeds are set to be full length. A couple years ago WordPress developers set the “more” link (the “continue reading” feature) to set the length of the outgoing feed for that post only. I’ve fought desperately to change that but they haven’t done so yet as it served a need, I think. Because I write very long posts, I use the “more” feature to keep the pageviews from being so long. I’m sorry that it impacts the feed length, but that’s not my intention nor goals.

Many people are now using Google Currents as their feed reader, enjoying a magazine style reading experience.

Unfortunately, feeds are starting to go the way of the dinosaur. Few people use them, though scrapers love them. I teach feeds in my college courses as we use them in the course, discussing the pros and cons as applies to WordPress and web publishing. It breaks my heart to see so few people in the class even know what they are. I can’t live without my feeds.

Maybe I used the wrong term by using feeds because what I mean is by no way going the way of the dinosaur!! In fact, what I mean by feeds is growing by leaps and bounds because of mobile devices. I use Feedly (Feedly.com) an awesome app that presents blogs, etc. in a magazine format.

I understand what you mean about people not knowing about feeds but I really think it is more of a learning curve and also a change in how people subscribe to feeds. Feedly and other apps are so pretty and are SO easy to use that many people are subscribing to blogs from within the app more than by clicking on an RSS button. I think the whole “RSS” was just too foreign for non-techies to grasp in spite of the RS meaning Real Simple. I am a techie and I still can’t even explain it!!

Thank you for the link and I will definitely check out the Greasemonkey script. I like your blog a lot and would like to stay subscribed to it.

I think you must mean “If you understand how WordPress.com works” because I use WordPress on all my sites and WordPress developers have not throttled the length of posts by any means, but I have my sites set up as self-hosted WordPress sites. (I use Bluehost as my hosting service.) However, I can see why they might do that on WordPress.com since they host all the blogs on the WordPress servers.

SEO used to be effected a huge by the amount of “hits” a site gets so the original purpose of excerpted posts was to MAKE readers have to go to a site to read the post. Ranking sites by “hits” or by links became too easy for people to game the system so a while back Google totally revamped the way it ranks sites (search on “Google Panda” for more information on this). To my knowledge, SEO has never been effected by the length of posts. What Panda set out to do was to rank sites on quality of content more than hits and links. It seems to be working; at least for my sites.

You are using the correct term. A feed is often called RSS or by the other names of the various types of feeds. There are many types of Feed Readers including magazine styles.

The Greasemonkey Script is only for the Google Feed Reader. WordPress and WordPress.com work the same way with the use of the More feature. If you do not use it, your feeds will not be truncated. As explained, mine are set to be full in spite of thousands (I wish I was kidding) of scrapers using my feeds to fill their sites without copyright permission. This is a common practice by those frustrated with plagiarism. They only appear truncated on posts where I use the “more” feature. Try it.

SEO is no longer ranked by the system of “hits” as you explain them, and you are right about Panda. With the introduction of AJAX, hits have gone the way of the dinosaur as interaction on a site can happen without a hit or pageview or page load. Makes it complicated to track, but it’s just the way of the web today. There is so much more that goes into the secret sauce of evaluating a website or web page.

People rarely think about their content in relationship with feed any more. They don’t write for them, use them, or count on them for traffic. They continue to be invaluable to me. I’ve requested WordPress change this feature for years. Sometimes they listen.😀

Hi Lorelle,
I see the date for your PCC/Rock Creek WordPress class is Jan, 2012, and when I checked the PCC class listing for WordPress CAS181w, I see course number 18871 has been cancelled! Is this the case? Say it ain’t so!

It looks like you’re getting some spam in the comments section… is this issue address in the class?🙂

It was 2013. Sorry about that. Unfortunately, with all the distractions of the holidays, combined with the last minute announcement that I was teaching the class, and no other promotion, it didn’t fill this quarter, but get on the registration for next quarter as that one will fill FAST.

The holidays are when the spammers kick in full gear. I’ve had great fun over the past few weeks blowing them all away as fast as I can, but you caught some! Thanks!

After I originally commented I seem to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on each time a comment is added I recieve four emails with the same comment. Perhaps there is a means you are able to remove me from that service? Cheers!

Neat blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it from somewhere? A theme like yours with a few simple adjustements would really make my blog shine. Please let me know where you got your design. Thanks

Superb blog! Do you have any helpful hints for aspiring writers? I’m planning to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you suggest starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many choices out there that I’m completely confused .. Any ideas? Cheers!